The boat people who came… and couldn’t leave

When two small fishing vessels sailed into Gaza Port on 23 August
with their renegade crews of international solidarity activists,
thousands of Gazans came to greet them. It was a glorious sunny
afternoon, and the 46 activists on board the boats had done something
amazing: after sailing more than 30 hours from Cyprus, they’d broken
the siege of Gaza. Few of us who live here thought they’d make it, and
we were delighted to be proved wrong.

The ‘boat people’ were whisked away to a local hotel, where they
were congratulated, fed and interviewed. They spent several days
dashing up and down the Strip visiting local communities, and then, on
28 August, most of them sailed back to Cyprus, taking seven local
Palestinians with them. Another of the group, Jeff Halper, founder of
the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, crossed the northern
Gaza border into Israel, where he lives, was promptly arrested and then
released. Now just nine of the boat people are left in Gaza.

‘We tried to get out through Rafah and Erez crossings,’ one of them,
Donna from America, told me yesterday (Rafah is the crossing to Egypt
and Erez the crossing to Israel). She told me they had been turned back
from both crossings, and are now stranded inside Gaza. ‘We are like the
Palestinians now,’ she added.

Many international pundits accused the boat people of being naïve
do-gooders who arrived in Gaza almost empty-handed, and have changed
nothing about the siege, and in some ways this has been a missed
opportunity. The boat people could have been far more media savvy and
used their 15 minutes of fame to highlight how the Israeli siege is
strangling life in Gaza, but instead seem to have been swept up in the
drama of their own voyage. Donna and the others are not ‘like
Palestinians’: they chose to come to Gaza, have foreign passports and
will probably be stranded for no more than a couple of weeks before the
diplomatic efforts kick in. Meanwhile, many of my friends have not been
able to get out of Gaza for years. At the end of the day the other boat
people are privileged foreigners who will be allowed to go home.

But on the other hand it is very easy to snipe at ‘do-gooders’ from
the comfort of Europe, the US or Canada. The boat people did something
remarkable because they took positive action to break the siege of
Gaza. When Donna and the others took the risk of sailing here, they
opened a crack in the wall – and when a crack opens it is only a matter
of time before the light gets in.

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The Gaza Blog

The Gaza blog is a weekly dispatch from the Gaza Strip. Louisa Waugh lives and works in Gaza, and her blogs capture the complexities and challenges of daily life under siege, amidst the aftermath of Israel’s devastating recent offensive.

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